Most mobile terminals support the management of a contact list, for example, adding, deleting and querying a contact object. Generally, the information of a contact object in the contact list includes a plurality of fields such as phone number, name, company, occupation, residence address, mail address and memorandum. At present, the function of contact object querying provided by the mobile terminals is rather simple, and mostly, the mobile terminals only support searching based on the phone number field or the name field. In the case of the iPhone Operating System (iOS) developed by Apple Inc., for example, the contact list application of iOS supports a full-match search for phone numbers, and a full pinyin-based search for a Chinese name.
Because it is usually difficult to recite the phone number of a contact object and it is time consuming to input pinyins (i.e. Chinese phonetic alphabets, or phonetic spelling) for Chinese characters, it is complicated and inconvenient to search for a contact object on the mobile terminal.